Commentary
The Overwriting Issue
This isn't a partisan screed -- you've got plenty of places across the blogosphere to click for that sort of thing. So here goes: Why is the White House getting a free pass where overwriting the same backup tapes is concerned?This isn't a partisan screed -- you've got plenty of places across the blogosphere to click for that sort of thing. So here goes: Why is the White House getting a free pass where overwriting the same backup tapes is concerned?You may have seen the coverage explaining what happened to three years' worth of e-mails that the administration has been unable to find or reproduce. The answer to the mystery? They recycled the same backup tapes, over-writing documents and e-mail from 2001 to 2003. Call it the Etch-A-Sketch defense.
There are, of course, pending lawsuits about this sort of storage sloppiness, and righteous cries that this content belongs to the people, not the government or the messages' creators. Congress, in its typically flaccid way, will investigate and hold hearings and a great chorus of harrumphs will be heard across the land.
More Software Insights
White Papers
- Creating the Enterprise-Class Tablet Environment - by Yankee Group
- Red Alert: Why Tablet Security Matters - by BlackBerry
Reports
More >>Webcasts
- Maximize ROI with Database Consolidation onto Private Clouds
- The ABC's of Cloud Computing in the Midmarket
The Veterans Administration got smacked around pretty good 18 months ago for its negligence in data handling. They even fired a couple IT staffers. And a fair number of financial services companies have been dinged millions for their inability to produce electronic documents or records for courts and regulators.
Should the White House be fined? Why aren't any individuals held responsible or accountable? We expect much, much more of publicly held companies in the wake of the Enron and WorldCom scandals. So why isn't the highest office of the land subject to at least the same threshold of responsibility and disclosure?
Oddly, bottom-feeding PR firms haven't landed on this news item as a gambit for me to talk to their client about how this Oval Office mess could have been avoided with their client's product. (Please, that's not an invitation.) And I'll be surprised if any of the current crop of presidential candidates adds a storage integrity plank to their platform.
But regardless of party or political stripe, it seems a small thing to follow basic backup protocol. Neither e-mail preservation nor tape handling are new disciplines. It makes it a real challenge not to impute malice or forethought to the administration. Here's hoping next November's winner handles these kinds of details with more care and respect.
Related Reading
| To upload an avatar photo, first complete your Disqus profile. | View the list of supported HTML tags you can use to style comments. | Please read our commenting policy. | |
|
|
T-Shirt Giveaway: Each week we're selecting one great comment from our readers. The author of the comment will receive an InformaitonWeek Community t-shirt. So get posting! |
Subscribe to RSSResource Links
This Week's Issue
Technology Whitepapers
- Mobile BI: Actionable Intelligence for the Agile Enterprise
- How To Regain IT Control In An Increasingly Mobile World - by BlackBerry
- The BlackBerry PlayBook tablet's Good Bones - by BlackBerry
- Red Alert: Why Tablet Security Matters - by BlackBerry
- New Visual and Wizard-Driven Paradigms for Exploring Data and Developing Analytic Workflows
Featured Broadcast
This white paper explains how to create a manageable, scalable environment suited to answer real-time business needs by building out a data center on a standards-based, virtualization-aware, energy-efficient and affordable platform. Plus, learn how virtualization is making the jump from the server realm into the application, mobile and database worlds in the additional resources section.
Learn More












